Pakistan's excessive Internet censorship plans

Last month, Pakistan's government put out requests for
proposals for a massive, centralized, Internet censorship system. Explaining
that "ISPs and backbone providers have expressed their inability to block
millions of undesirable web sites using current manual blocking systems,"
the state-run National Information Communications Technology Research and
Development Fund said it therefore requires "a national URL filtering and
blocking system."

The new system would need to handle "up to 50 million
[blacklisted] URLs," and would operate across the entire Pakistani
Internet. The research fund intends the system to be designed and built within
the country, "by companies, vendors, academia and/or research
organizations with proven track record."

Fifty million URLs is quite a tall order -- but not, sadly,
for the demands of an Internet censorware device. Censorship, managed by
routers and software built by a number of companies, scales rather easily to
such demands. Companies like McAfee sell blocking systems for corporate
intranets with databases in excess of 25
million web addresses. Such databases have been re-purposed for national
firewalls in countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for many
years.

It is democratic oversight which fails to scale to such
numbers. Databases of millions of sites inevitably include "false
positives" -- sites that should never have been included, even on the
terms of the blacklist. That's why corporate blocks have been shown to include feminist
and gay rights sites under "pornography," as well as high-profile
blogging and micro-blogging sites like Twitter
and LiveJournal as "dating"
websites. When these databases are applied to national firewalls, such
sites disappear from general access.

Worse, it's impossible for citizens to oversee such blocking
systems to prevent over-censorship, including of news sites, by those in power.
Pakistan's current censorship policy is unclear, but already sites such as the Baloch
Hal and others carrying news about Baluchistan -- a contested region of
Pakistan with a number of secessionist groups -- are blocked. Any future
blacklist will undoubtedly be kept secret. And the centralized nature of the
database means that the government will be able to censor sites swiftly, with
no checks and balances. In the RFP's technical description, there's no room for
any civic oversight.

Even the small steps taken by some Pakistani ISPs to
automate Internet censorship has led to over-blocking. Last year, a blocking
system introduced by one telecommunications company, Mobitel, meant that
Pakistani Internet users could not even search
for the name of Asif Al Zardari, their own president.

An unchecked, centrally-controlled, censorship regime with
such vast capacity is a recipe for disaster for local online press freedom.
Companies, vendors, and academics thinking of applying for the role would be
complicit in building a system that could easily -- and judging on past behavior, would inevitably -- be
misused by the Pakistan government.

San Francisco-based CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator Danny O’Brien has worked globally as a journalist and activist covering technology and digital rights. Follow him on Twitter @danny_at_cpj.